We have the idea that philosophy is an unemotional way of considering human knowledge and testing its reliable logics. Is it not an essentially impersonal attempt to discover abiding truths and their orderly, more or less necessary, connection? The philosophers we are incited to respect are those whose logic is least susceptible to charges of idiosyncrasy and whose arguments are clean of rhetoric. When Russell remarked ‘the worse the logic, the more interesting the results,’ was he not warning us against looking to him for entertaining theories or pyrotechnic display? Flashiness, we were intended to gather, is not a happy method in philosophy; the brightest are those who are not ashamed to be dull; our passion is best reserved for the dispassionate. Roughly speaking, one gathers, all philosophical objects are colourless.

The philosophers most commonly admired in the British tradition are, unsurprisingly, those whose practice mirrors what the British like to think of as their own sensible and typically unassuming qualities: the absence of what Byron called ‘enthusy-musy’ is the happiest warrant of worth. David Hume's lack of credulity in the prospect of—and certainly the arguments for—religious salvation, makes him an exemplary figure among those who, while honouring a trenchant prose style, are wary of dogma and averse to mystification. Dr Johnson may have accused Hume of writing like a Frenchman, but Johnson had not read Sartre or Pierre Boutang, say, whose so-called philosophy is, for the most part, indistinguishable from exhortation or autobiography, not to say rant.